Learning Magic Starts With Saving Up the Alphabet

About ten books.

He had to read them all, or rather, memorize them all.

Magister Eliot, feeling he had repaid his debt, took his leave. Gret stood before the table, gazing at the thick stack of textbooks before him and let out a soft sigh.

He reached out his hand to measure them: about ten books, each larger than the 16mo size from his previous life by a full circle, stacked from the sturdy oak tabletop all the way up to his neck. If he leaned forward and lowered his head, his chin would rest perfectly on the surface of the books.

This thickness...

It's just a small matter.

What medical student's textbooks, workbooks, and atlases, when stacked, wouldn't reach a person's height?

Following Magister Eliot's instructions, Gret flipped through the stack of books. The first book, he didn't recognize the characters. The second, he didn't recognize the characters. The third, still didn't recognize the characters...

Damn it!

Are they all written in Magic Script?

So, to learn magic, I first have to learn a language?

And it's a silent language at that...

Clinging to a sliver of hope, Gret flipped from the first book to the last. He discovered that apart from Magic Script Studies, all other basic textbooks and principles of magic were written in characters he didn't recognize. With no other choice, he stacked those books back onto the shelf, opened the last one, and began to wrestle with Magic Script, whether he liked it or not.

Level 4 vocabulary list: 4500 words.

He memorized it in a month back then.

Level 6 vocabulary list: 5500 words.

He'd forgotten how long it took him back then. In any case, he memorized it whenever he found a gap under the pressure of his major courses, and passing Level 6 seemed quite easy.

Magic Script...

How many words are in this dictionary?

Gret hadn't counted, and he didn't want to.

The only thing he could be sure of was that this Magic Script Studies was the thickest book among the nearly a hundred books on the shelf. The other books were at most a fist thick, while this one was two fists thick.

The characters were also small. If the characters in the other books were size 1, or slightly larger than size 1, the characters in this book were size 2.

The sheer volume of content was almost comparable to a comprehensive dictionary...

Gret wailed silently. Gritting his teeth, he opened the first page and immediately felt like he'd been hit on the forehead with a heavy club.

The arrangement of this book was very arbitrary, written wherever the author thought of it, or perhaps, according to the author's perceived importance. At the beginning of the first page were the Four Great Elements, listed in order: Fire, Water, Wind, Earth.

Flip another page. Magic, Dragon, Spirit, Primordial, Mars, Venus, Sun, Saturn.

The third page. Macrocosm, Microcosm, Birth, Death, Sage, Devil...

Gret: ...

I want a dictionary!

I want all the words arranged in alphabetical order!

At least give me an alphabet first, ahhhhhh!

The 26 letters of the English alphabet, the Japanese Gojuon chart, the 30 letters of the German alphabet, and the International Phonetic Alphabet, please come back... I'll never complain about you being too basic again...

But no one responded to him.

There was no dictionary, no phonetic symbols, no one to cast Comprehend Languages to instantly teach him Magic Script, and no Intelligent Brain to scan all the information and engrave the unfamiliar language and script into his database.

After Gret's internal tears and lamentations concluded, he could only take out his pen from his backpack, spread out his paper, and begin to rely on himself and work hard—

First, he would count all the letters that appeared...

It took about half an hour. He flipped through thirty to fifty pages of the books he had, scribbling extensively on the paper. Confirming that no new letters appeared, Gret took a deep breath and began to sort them.

Fortunately, the appearance of this Magic Script bore some resemblance to the Latin alphabet. Gret purely went by appearance. Anything that looked like 'a' went first, anything that looked like 'b' went second. Those that didn't look like English letters were arranged in order of German letters, Roman letters, and so on.

What about a letter that looked particularly unique, unlike any other?

They were all thrown to the very end!

After this round of work, he realized that the script he had to learn wasn't too complicated. There were about sixty letters—considering that some of them only appeared at the beginning of words, it could be roughly inferred that there were uppercase and lowercase letters, meaning the total number of letters was about thirty.

Gret flipped through the manuscript paper in his hand, writing down a new letter every so often. Then, looking at the Magic Script Studies spread out before him, he took a deep breath, rubbed his wrists...

This entire book had to be reorganized!

It was too difficult, compiling a dictionary, it was truly too difficult... No wonder the Dictionary Publishing House only revised their comprehensive dictionary once every ten years; revising this book alone could support half the staff. The workload was simply that immense...

And now, all this work was his alone T_T

Never mind, when he read web novels before, some seniors had to decipher magic languages by treating them like breaking a code. Compared to them, he was quite fortunate to have an existing book to copy from...

Page by page, Gret copied the words from Magic Script Studies and their corresponding Common Tongue definitions under their respective initial letters. It must be said, copying was quite effective for deepening memory. At the very least, after copying one page, Gret found that he had already memorized the page he had copied.

Gret toiled away for a large part of the day, his eyes blurring and his wrists aching, suspecting he was developing tendonitis. Just as he was considering casting a Healing Spell to soothe his wrist, Gret realized he had encountered his first difficulty:

He had run out of paper.

He had brought only five or six sheets of paper, both sides densely filled with writing, and now, there was nowhere left to write...

Tear a blank page from which book?

Gret felt he couldn't do something like that.

Borrow paper from someone?

He didn't dare. Magister German had forbidden copying. If he went looking to borrow paper now, wouldn't he be walking right into the line of fire?

Ask someone for help, plead with Magister German?

Gret felt he hadn't lived long enough to want to be blasted into charcoal by a fireball...

He thought quickly for a moment, stuffed paper, a pen, and ink into his backpack, slung it over his shoulder, and left. He could still come back to look at the reference books tomorrow. If he didn't return to the city soon, the shop would close, and he'd have nowhere to buy paper~~~

He dashed back to the city and rushed into his own home. He shut the door, turned to the square table, moved aside the chair with the broken leg, and then moved the bricks propping up the chair's leg. He dug a few shovels' worth underneath. A small money pouch lay neatly in the dirt. Gret took it out and tipped it over. Clink, clink, clink went his palm as a small pile of coins fell out.

Two Silver Coins, seven Copper Coins.

At the other end of the long street, Uncle Simon's bakery sold black bread for one Copper Coin each. Eating sparingly, it could last a day.

One Silver Coin could be exchanged for ten Copper Coins. This tiny bag of money was the original body's expenses for a month.

--His salary in the City Guard was five Silver Coins a month. If he patrolled within the city, he could get a meal at the barracks. All accounted for, he could save two Silver Coins a month to cover other daily expenses.

But if he wanted to buy paper... this amount of money probably wasn't enough. The productivity level in this other world wasn't much better than the Middle Ages. As he recalled, paper and pens were prohibitively expensive in this era...

Gret hesitated for a moment, crawled under the bed, pushed aside the book chest, and dug out a small box from underneath.

Thanks to @SaltyTaro for the 100 Qidian Coins tip.

The collection count has been increasing so slowly lately... I'll try harder and make the content more interesting